Congratulations! Here's your first dungeon. You have one tiny Production Room and that's it.

To create a room (hell, to do practically anything), you need to grab the wall by holding the grab button (same as the Run button, it's A on the SNES controller and C on the Saturn), and then pull backwards on the d-pad.

Hey! A screen popped up. First, it asks if you want to make a room or a corridor. Most of the time you'll be making a room, which is the selection on the left.

Once you select that, you select the size and shape of the room. It needs to be a rectangle of a specific size. There are a few important things to pay attention to here. First off are all of the little dots. MEMORIZE WHAT I AM GOING TO SAY:

Yellow = Energy
Green = Sentan
Red = Items

The more yellow dots you can fit in a room, the more energy it will produce. Naturally, this is pretty important for a Production room, since producing energy is it's primary purpose. The amount of green dots in the room will affect the Sentan production, which determines how quickly you can upgrade the room. You can also carry both energy and Sentan into a room if either of these are lacking, but we'll get into that later.

The problem, as you can see, is that this particular area is pretty barren. You can kinda fidget and move around the room to get those three green dots and at least one yellow, but let's just build somewhere else for now. (You also can't build on the extremities on the level, which are indicated by brown squares. Eventually these go away as you channel more energy.)

Things are a little bit nicer on the south side. I've created a room that has something like four yellow Energy dots and three green Sentan dots (unfortunately this is a bit hard to see in this sections because the text blocks it.) Anyway this is a pretty prime piece of real estate, that will generate a lot of energy and be able to be upgraded relatively quickly.

When you move your room around, you'll notice that the Feng Shui symbol in the middle changes. This will determine the element of the room. Certain types of rooms are only buildable under certain elements, plus this will affect the Feng Shui, but we're not worried about that right now. We just want a second Production Room. This screen tells you all of the possible rooms you can make with that symbol. Production Room is there (you memorized the kanji, right?) so select it.

This is your new room. Man, what a dive. You'll need to clean it out before you can do anything. In this case, I just need to clear all of the rocks from the room. Sometimes there are minor enemies to be killed too.

Once you've cleared the room, the Room God will appear and let you pick the room you're going to make. It will also show the statistics regarding Sentan production and energy production/consumption. (Why they don't tell you this stuff in the earlier screen, I don't know.) Anyway, I've highlighted the Production room. It produces 9 Sentan per turn, creates 120 Energy per turn, and consumes 0 Energy per turn. Normally, you'll need to balance out Energy production and consumption on a per-room basis, but Production rooms have 0 consumption so you never need to worry. (Your little rat friend will bug you to make a Refinery first, since you already start with a Production room, but screw him. The more Production rooms the better, I say.)

Hooray! This is the first room you've made, and your second production room. Just go to the center altar, grab it, pull away and you'll extract the Energy crystals. The basic goal of the game is to round up as many crystals of these as possible, so you'll be doing this practically every turn.

Now we've got two energy Production rooms working for us. However, you'll want to upgrade them. Problem is, even if you built the room over a bunch of green dots, Sentan production will still be relatively slow. So you'll need to create a Sentan room so you can distribute it through your caverns. Above, I've created another room, cleared it out and am creating a Sentan room. It creates 36 Sentan per turn, nice. It creates 40 energy and consumes 30, so we don't need to worry about energy consumption....just yet. The problem is, we have no way to distribute Sentan to other rooms, we need our animal pals to do that. First we need to physically take some Sentan to summon a monster, so grab the altar, pull and get some of those orbs. Then create a Summoning Room.

After creating a Summoning Room and tugging the center, you'll get this screen where you can summon animals. Right now you can only summon three. The Rat is the same one that's been following you around the whole level. He can distribute energy to rooms that need it. Dragons distribute Sentan and Birds can resurrect rooms that are destroyed. Right now you need to distribute some Sentan so make a Dragon. You get to name it, but you can't do anything until the end of your turn. (We'll get to Recount Time in a sec!)

At this point, try to make another room. You'll notice that there is only one possible type of room, and it's not any of the normal ones. This means you can make a Dragon Furnace. It doesn't need any energy or Sentan, so just put it any old place.

It will create a set of stairs that leads to this room. Just enter the circle and hit A.

Now you can distribute the energy that you're carrying into the Dragon Furnance (remember! You must extract it first!) You're supposed to give 4000 total to beat the level but can only put in 1000 per turn. Just repeat until you've met the requirements.

At any point when the timer runs out. you get to this screen. This is the Recount Time where you can upgrade buildings, create groups of animals, send them on patrol routes, set traps and save the game. When you're done, just hit "end" to start the next turn. Up until the point where you build a Refinery to create Sentan or a Summoning Room for monsters, there's really not much you can do here.

If you choose Upgrade and highlight a room, you'll get this screen. In this case, this is a Production room? See the top option that says "Energy Production LV2"? (You know your katakana, right?) That will upgrade your Energy Production. Since it's not greyed out, I have enough Sentan to improve it. If it was greyed out, I'd need some more.

Upgrading will bring up this screen. I don't know what all of this means, but the gist of all of this is that now this Production room will generate 240 Energy per turn instead of 120. Awesome!!

After highlighting the Sentan room and choosing to upgrade the Sentan output, a similar screen comes up. See that red negative number? That means that upgrading this room will cause the energy consumption to outbalance it's production. This is bad. If upgraded the room will produce 54 Sentan instead of 36, but with a negative Energy yield it won't do squat. We'll need to transport extra energy every turn to make sure this functions properly. So let's learn how to set routes.

Right now we have a rat that's following your character (group 1) and a dragon (group 2). The highlighted option allows you to select a route for that particular group. (In this case, Group 2, since Group 1 is character controlled.)

Setting routes is easy. See what I've done? The dragon carries Sentan from the refining room and distributes it to the two Productions rooms. It will continue to run this route until you tell it to stop. This is pretty much how you keep your cave running.

But wait! The Sentan room has negative energy so it doesn't produce anything. We need the rat to join this party too, since the rat transports Energy. This way it will carry excess Energy from the Production room back to the Sentan room so it can run smoothly. Since creating another Group requires that we build another Summoning Room, we won't bother. So I'll just stick the Rat in Group 2. This is done on the Party Customize screen. Just choose Switch Members, highlight the rat and put it in Group 2.

Great! Now the rat and dragon will follow the same route, each distributing resources throughout your small cave. These are the major things you need to know about Recount Time.

Sometimes enemies attack. Actually pretty much every turn they'll create portals around your cave and send bad guys in. They show up on the map, so you'll be able to track them down. Make sure to destroy the portals to stop them from coming out!

Hit X to bring up the menu. The Spells option is especially useful, because you have a healing spell right at the beginning of the game. The Map is the same one in Recount Time and can be activated any time by pressing the L button.

And those are the basics of Chaos Seed.